Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen: the young Friedrich Nietzsche hones his philological and rhetorical prowess on the Pre-Socratics, and in doing so intimates his future course as philosopher. So for instance in his exposition of Heracleitus we find the roots of his later attacks on the self-identical and the concepts of good and evil. Damned fine writing. Maybe I'll do a translation with commentary one of these times.

A smattering of books touching on post-colonialism and the CIA. In The Shock Doctrine, Noami Klein makes the case that you usually hear from the right, viz, that barbarity follows when the abstractions of university intellectuals are imposed upon living cultures. Just as the brain-erasure techniques of MK Ultra amount to instruments of violence, Klein argues, so too did the free-market fundamentalism of Milton Friedman and his epigones at the University of Chicago turn the ostensibly tabula rasa economies of South America into bloodbaths. But Paul Johnson (Modern Times) tells a very different story. So do we attribute the economic turmoil and political repression of Argentina to Juan Peron's efforts in nationalization and welfare, or to what followed? Did Thatcher rescue a foundering economy or spoil an equitable society? Was the Bandung generation largely a collection of savages, political dilettantes and intellectual poseurs, or did they represent an ernest and justified hope for self-determination outside the ambit of the two great superpowers? To what extent were the heavy-handed methods of the US and Britain justified? Stephen Kinzer, in The Brothers, seconds Klein's basic moral indictment of the CIA in the early years of the Cold War: on his telling lack of oversight, lack of accountability, stakeholder involvement, a basic disregard for the lives of third world peoples, along with Manichean anti-communism of Allen and John Foster Dulles, all converged to create a series of human rights outrages the world over. But is this a problem with intelligence per se, or does it stem from the specific configuration of the CIA and the haste with which it was launched? And how much of the problem lay, not in too much intelligence but from not enough intelligence? Kinzer briefly observes that the agency knew so little about their enemy that they missed the glaring fact: in the wake of WWII Russia was in shambles. How much of the Dulles brothers' missionary zeal rested on a gross overestimation of Russia's capabilities? Or, as Tim Weiner puts it in Legacy of Ashes, how would history have played out had the early American cold warriors known that the conflict was to be settled economically and not militarily? We need intelligence, Weiner argues, but we've been going about it all wrong, to which the long string of CIA fiascos attests. OK, he as much as admits, there was the ouster of the communists in the 1948 election in Italy, which the CIA backed. And the long standing anti-left politics of Japan, another CIA coup. And other successes, such as, well, I guess I don't know what they'd be, and nor would Weiner--or Johnson, Kinzer or Klein--because CIA operations tend to be only visible to the extent they fail. CIA people--so I've been told--tend to shake their head with an "if only they knew" when they look at the headlines. But they can't let us in, because that would blow covers and entire operations. So the question is, how much should we be willing to trust? It's an awful question to have to ask.

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum is many things: a story of self-discovery, an insider's view of Asperger syndrome, a plea for the cognitive complementarity of mental types. Fascinating stuff.

But then she launches into this:

Now, I'm certainly not the first person to notice that patterns are part of how humans think. Mathematicians, of instance, have studied the patterns in music for thousands of years. They have found that geometry can describe chords, rhythms, scales, octave shifts, and other musical features. In recent studies, researchers have discovered that if they map out the relationships between these features, the resulting diagrams assume Möbius strip-like shapes.

The composers, of course, don't think of their compositions in these terms. They're not thinking about math. They're thinking about music. But somehow, they are working their way toward a pattern that is mathematically sound, which is another way of saying that it's universal. The math doesn't even have to exist yet. When scholars study classical music, they find that a composer such as Chopin wrote music that incorporated forms of higher-dimensional geometry that hadn't yet been discovered. The same is true in visual arts. Vincent van Gogh's later paintings had all sorts of swirling, churning patterns in the sky--clouds and stars that he painted as if they were whirlpools of air and light. And, it turns out, that's what they were! In 2006, physicists compared van Gogh's patterns of turbulence with the mathematical formula for turbulence in liquids. The paintings date to the 1880s. The mathematical formula dates to the 1930s. Yet van Gogh's turbulence in the sky provided an almost identical match for turbulence in liquid. "We expected some resemblance with real turbulence," one of the researchers said, "but we were amazed to find such a good relationship."

Even the seemingly random splashes of paint that Jackson Pollock dripped onto his canvases show that he had an intuitive sense of pattern in nature. In the 1990s, an Australian physicist, Richard Taylor, found that the paintings followed the mathematics of fractal geometry--a series of identical patterns at different scales, like nesting Russian dolls. The paintings date from the 1940s and 1950s. Fractal geometry dates from the 1970s. That same physicist discovered that he could even tell the difference between a genuine Pollock and a forgery by examining the work for fractal patterns. (pp.143-5)

Now it's intriguing to think that artists, using intuition, prepare the way for systematizers to make breakthrough discoveries. I've long thought that this the case, at least on occasion. But there's a downside to this notion. Why do we have to wait for the sciences to catch up to the artists for their artistic works to be legitimated? And why must we focus only on those aspects of the works of art that find their echoes in scientific research? Is the rest just chaff? And moreover, doesn't this grant the yardstick of authority to scientists instead of artists, as opposed to artists, at the expense of artists--and anyone else for that matter?What could possibly legitimate that concession? More math and science? Of course not--that would just beg the question.

I mean, what if a scientific proposition had to lead to new art in order to be accepted?

What I challenge here is the scientifically ungrounded assumption of the scientifically minded that science is the measure of all things. And I'm not picking on Grandin necessarily. A much more flagrant example is Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, in which a superficial understanding of the latter two figures was deployed in service of the first, whose innovative approach to mathematical decidability was to have given Hofstadter the hammer to crack the mind-body problem.

Now, what were Escher and Bach really doing in there (heck, even Gödel for that matter)? My guess: Hofstadter had stapled them to the title to lend the allure of high culture to a very geeky exposition of a very geeky argument. Attract some bees, and maybe a butterfly. And it worked: the book went like wildfire. But did anyone get anything from it, aside from the belief that they, too, were now privy to the hidden nexus of math and art? And that this had something to do with 'FlooP' and 'GlooP'?

That I can't say--but someday GEB may just serve to inspire a great sculptor. Shall we call it worthwhile then?